(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where there's smoke pouring out of the boxcar door.
We begin in Alabama, now known forever as The Lair Of The Creepy Mom, where one state legislator is standing alone in the fight to keep Space Camp safe from...ahem...alien influences. From Al.com:
A state lawmaker has proposed adding Space Camp to a bill currently before the Alabama House which would prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. Butler has said the bill is needed “purify the schools.” “FYI please know we have a plan to address the Space Camp situation and we will address it next week,” Butler wrote on Facebook. “HB 130 expands our existing K-5 sexual identity and sexual orientation ban to K-12 and we will have an amendment adding Space Camp. This bill will be voted on next week in Education Policy.”
Attempts to reach Space Camp for comment were not immediately successful. The employee at the center of the dispute declined to comment when contacted on Monday by AL.com The employee has not been charged or accused of any wrongdoing. In a statement Monday afternoon, the Alabama Space and Rocket Center said it follows federal guidelines and does not discriminate against protected classes when hiring.
This whole exercise in abject absurdity was inspired by one of those Concerned Parents.
Clay Yarbrough of Owens Cross Roads, the father of an 11-year-old Huntsville city school student, said he became aware on Thursday evening that a Space Camp crew member is transgender. His daughter was to attend camp in a week as part of a school exercise, he said. “I heard that one little girl had called her parents and said this guy is in the (dorm) room and ‘I don’t feel comfortable,’” Yarbrough said. The employee referenced by critics declined to comment Monday.
The things some people actually decide to care about continue to amaze and astonish.
We move along to Michigan, where the under-new-management Republican National Committee is cranking out some new tunes on the party organ. They've filed a suit against Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson et. al. demanding another purge of Michigan's voting rolls for the same crock-of-beans reasons we've been hearing since 2020. From Democracy Docket:
Following a swift overhaul in the past week, the RNC’s former leadership has now been replaced primarily with close allies of former President Donald Trump. With former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump at the helm as co-chairs, the RNC has assumed an avowedly more offensive “election integrity” strategy.
In an interview with the Washington Post on Tuesday, Trump’s campaign advisor, Chris LaCivita stated that “[t]he RNC’s new posture as it relates to litigation is much more offensive and much less defensive.” Lara Trump, who appeared on Fox News the same day, told Sean Hannity that the RNC is devoting “massive resources” to the organization’s “first ever election integrity division.”
Oh, joy. This is already a barrel of fun.
Against the backdrop of the RNC’s new lawsuit, Republicans and right-wing activists are engaging in a nationwide, conspiracy-ridden effort both in and out of the courtroom to purge eligible voters from the rolls. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) is currently working to reinstate the voter registrations of over 1,000 individuals residing in Detroit-area suburbs, whose registrations were improperly canceled as a result of a right-wing voter purge scheme. As of today, the RNC is involved in 23 anti-voting lawsuits across 14 states, many of which seek to restrict the voting process in key swing states — including Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — ahead of the 2024 elections.
It begins. As if it ever ended.
Skip across the Big Lake to Wisconsin, where a parachute case named Eric Hovde, the Republican candidate against incumbent U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, determined that Wisconsin would be the ideal state in which to run when you were on record as opposing the "commercialization" of alcohol. From Rolling Stone:
In 2017, when he was considering another run for office, Republican Eric Hovde said that, if it were up to him, alcohol would only be available to people who brew or distill it themselves. Acknowledging that it would be difficult to wind back the commercialization of alcohol, Hovde went on to say: “The horse is out of the barn, and it’s going to be hard to put back.”
Apparently, Hovde was talking about decriminalizing weed when his train of thought jumped the track.
“So, if we just decriminalize [marijuana]? Fine. Nobody’s going to go to jail. No one’s going to get arrested for it. That’s your self-determination, but you’re not going to turn it into an enterprise. Frankly, it should have happened with alcohol,” Hovde says in the audio. “I mean look at — alcohol has a lot of negative byproducts. If somebody wanted to distill it, drink it. Fine, go ahead. But, sadly, as we know, it’s produced a lot of negative byproducts as a part of society. I don’t think adding more negative byproducts to society is a healthy thing. And saying that, I think the cat’s out of the — or, the horse is out of the barn, and it’s going to be hard to put back.”
Cats/bag. Horse/barn. Toothpaste/tube. If you're going to run for the Senate on the basis of your weird ideas, strange analogies, and your checkbook, a class in rhetoric wouldn't be out of line.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Ted-Talkin' Buckaroo Friedman of the Plains brings us the saga of state legislators who find enhanced democracy inconvenient ...even when the democracy was enhanced through devices fashioned 100-odd years ago. From Oklahoma Watch:
But a pending resolution in the Legislature, authored by a representative who believes the state’s method of direct democracy favors urban residents, would force organizers to Taloga and dozens of other rural communities across the state to get their question on the ballot. House Joint Resolution 1054...During committee debate, Hardin said the measure would give rural Oklahomans a greater voice on what appears on the ballot. Hardin, who served as Adair County Sheriff before being elected to the House in 2018, said he has never seen signature collectors in far eastern Oklahoma. .If the effort had been made to come to rural Oklahoma, we might not be looking at this,” he said. “I think it will help democracy.”
The scheme is related in its techniques to the floor-space argument in national elections and it is premised on the Oklahoma variations of the Cletus safari theory of who the salt of the earth really are.
Rep. Andy Fugate, D-Oklahoma City, said he fears the proposal would allow a handful of sparsely populated counties to “hold the state hostage” and keep a measure from appearing before voters. “The reality is that we have five counties with less than 1,500 voters,” Fugate said. “These counties are going to have a complete override over whether the people can take matters into their own hands. We are going to centralize all of the legislative power in this body.”
Fugate County is the seat of all power.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
